


The Five Girls Jace Wishes He Hadn't Slept With

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: 5 Times, Canon Compliant, F/M, First Time, Multi, Promiscuity, Sexual Experimentation, Slut Shaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-16
Updated: 2011-01-16
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:38:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jace’s gold eyes look through Clary in a way that he’s never looked at anyone before. Not Isabelle, when they took each other’s virginity in the middle of the night; not Kaelie, when she grabbed him by the beltloops and pulled him into the icy kitchen; not Tessa, when she coiled herself around his hips and kissed and bit at his star-shaped mark; not the faceless red-haired girl who would never, never be Clary; not Aline, who wanted so desperately to want him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Five Girls Jace Wishes He Hadn't Slept With

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer** : I don't own anything. All characters, settings, and proprietary language are owned by the author of the work from which this is derived. 
> 
> ORIGINALLY POSTED [HERE](http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/28769.html) on 16 January 2011.

** The Five Girls Jace Wishes He Hadn't Slept With and the Reason Why **

**  
_001\. Isabelle_   
**  
Whenever he and Alex razz Isabelle about being so promiscuous, Jace wishes he could read her mind and find out whether it’s his fault.

She really had been too young, then. So had he, he realizes now.

But on the night of his fifteenth birthday, Jace Wayland had woken up to a small, warm body sliding into his bed and the scent of orange perfume and silver-gold electrum floating over him.

 _What do you want for your birthday?_ she had whispered, one leg – long even then, but thin and coltish, and _warm_ , too warm, so much skin – curving up over his hip. Jace had run his hand along that leg, feeling the very first runes inked into her skin: strength, speed, equilibrium. There were no _iratzes_ yet. These were the runes for someone primed for battle but who had never seen a fight. 

_You,_ Jace whispered, still half-asleep, his body heavy and hard. He never even opened his eyes, and felt like he was floating in the between-space even when Isabelle hovered over his hips and slowly, so painfully slowly, slid down over him. Between sleeping and waking, belief and dream, love and lust and… apathy.

Once he was inside, there was a long floating moment before Isabelle could move, and Jace quietly, sleepily thumbed at the crease of her hip, feeling the scar of a rune over her bone. _Bind To._ He wondered, fleetingly, what this meant to Isabelle. What it would mean to Alec.

“You can’t tell him,” Isabelle whispered from somewhere above him, as though she had read his thoughts, as she braced her hands on his chest and tentatively raised her hips for the first time. “Not ever. You can’t tell him.”

Jace just sighed and nodded and sank deeper into the plain of his pillow. His hips moved lazily just of out sync with Isabelle’s, neither of them practiced or knowing yet and just barely able to understand. Isabelle hissed a curse when he made a soft sound and came inside her; she tried to pull away but was seconds too late and a long white line of _Jace_ speckled the inside of her thigh and the hollow of his belly.

Jace rolled over and curled an arm around her waist. _Sorry._

Isabelle slipped free of his grasp like she’d never been there at all and ghosted the smallest of kisses over one of his jumping, sleepy eyelids. “Happy birthday.”

The next morning she sat across from him at breakfast, raced him in the gymnasium, asked for his help with Latin in the library. He looked at her intently as she studied, her long, glossy, dark hair falling over her shoulders and dusting the pages of the old, vellum book, and Jace thought maybe she should look different to him than she had the day before. She owned his virginity, and she would forever. And he owned hers, forever. 

It should have meant something more to him than it did.

 ** _002\. Kaelie_**  
Kaelie was glamorous and a little _off_ , somehow, in a mostly-good way, and could have had anyone she wanted, Shadowhunter, Downworlder, or mundane. But she chose Jace. She chose Jace to push up against the cold steel of the fridge in Taki’s back room late one evening when the place had closed down; she chose Jace to bend her over the counter a week later, her blue-white wings a blur of movement around the corners of his eyes when she came; she chose Jace to taste what was between her silver-blue thighs when he laid her out on the corner booth like a sacrifice – he was demon-sour like vinegar and angel-sweet like a bite of heady sugar.

Jace really liked being the chosen one, and when they ended after a short few months of all fucking and no talking, that was what he had of Kaelie to miss most. 

**_003\. Tessa_**  
He had no idea how old she was, who she was, what she was; he only knew she was beautiful and ageless and the proprietess of The Pandemonium Club. He curved behind her like nested spoons in one of the club’s dark, pulsing-blue back rooms, and she moved back against him with a hundred years’ sinuous carnal knowledge.

“Why me?” Jace whispered, trailing his fingertip along the long wing of her shoulder blade as she opened her legs wider and let him slide in deeper, deeper.

The proprietess sighed and dropped her head back to his shoulder, her long, pale brown hair scented with peppermint and something like coal smoke and brass, something ancient and proper and not from here. “You remind me of someone I once loved.” She turned her head to tongue the star-shaped white scar on his shoulder. “You have the same mark.”

Years later Jace would realize, touching the Herondale mark on his shoulder, that Tessa Gray was the first person who knew he was not Valentine Morgenstern’s son. 

**_004\. [        ]_**  
He thinks she may be a vampire, but with the strobe lights going high and the vodka in his blood dulling all of his senses, he’s really not even sure anymore. All he knows is that Clary

Clary

Clary

Clary is his goddamned fucking sister and he can’t have her and he doesn’t want anyone else to have her, ever, ever, ever, and he can’t have her ever, ever, ever, and he takes everything he feels out on his faceless redheaded Downworlder who he can pretend looks like her in the dark between each flash of light.

But the eyes are wrong, they’re not looking at him like Clary’s eyes; he can tell that even this drunk –

And the lips are wrong, they’re laughing at him but they’re not crinkling right in the corners – 

“God, you’re wasted,” laughs the Downworlder girl, “I’m surprised your cock still works right you’re so drunk.” She scratches her fingernails down his Marked arm so hard his blood rises, barely a trickle and more a bloom of red petals, and she lowers her head to lick at it, moaning against his skin and wetter around him. “What are you running away from tonight?” 

“ _Fuck you_ ,” hisses Jace, and he does, harder still, until he feels like their bones should break. 

**_005\. Aline_ **  
_Because you’re the kind of guy who gives a memorable one-time wham-bam, thank-you ma’am._

The only glad thing Jace has in the world is that they were finished and nearly all-dressed again before Clary

Clary

Clary burst into the room. 

**_001\. Clarissa_**  
“Have you ever?” he asks her quietly, trailing one fingertip along the scooped curve of her neckline in that black gear that once belonged to her mother. _Her_ mother. Not _theirs_. Sometimes, Jace could hardly believe his luck. 

Clary’s skin burns pink between her freckles. He’s kissed them all. 

“Almost once,” she whispers, surprising him. “With Simon. But…” she trails off and takes hold of his fingers; brings them up to her mouth and sucks on them until his eyes want to roll back in his head. “I knew who I really wanted was you. Even then.”

Jace bites his lip and wishes he could say the same thing to her, but he won’t lie to her. Not now, especially not about this. ‘ _Demons lie, Clary_ ,’ he’d said once, and he knew now – they both knew – they were the furthest thing from demons that humans could be.

He cups his hand over her jaw. And he kisses her.

That makes her different.

“I love you,” he whispers and the way her eyes alight, even still, makes his stomach hurt like all of his organs are twisted; ripped out by the Angel and stuffed back in dirty and bleeding and leaving him to do all his own stitching and rather than stitched back up into their places, he stitched them into a map of Clary.

When she says _I love you, too_ there’s still a tinge of surprise there, in the back of her voice, like she’ll never get over being amazed that they can say that to each other and really be allowed to mean it in the way that they do.

Jace pulls back and narrows his eyes. “How ‘almost?’”

Clary’s face burns. She buries it in Jace’s chest. 

“Does it matter?”

Jace kisses the top of her head. “It does. It does matter. I never used to think so. But… I need to know this about you, Clary, and I can’t explain why. I need to know _everything_ about you. It hurts like a blade that Simon might know things about you that I don’t.”

Clary looks up at him, her chin still rubbing against his sternum, just over his heart, like she’s an affectionate cat. “How about you? Have you – I mean, I assume you have, but – ”

Jace looks up to the ceiling. “I have.”

Clary doesn’t pull away; she slides her thumb beneath the hem of his t-shirt instead and fingers a jagged, painful-looking scar along his side – not the result of a blade, not really, just an appendectomy that got infected. He’s human, at least in part. “How many?”

Jace sits down on the bed with a heavy sigh and scrubs a hand through his pale gold hair. “Isabelle and I were – she was my first. It was my fifteenth birthday.”

Clary sits beside him and puts her hand on his knee, and Jace isn’t sure whether she’ll want to touch him again by the time he’s done. “I always kinda suspected that.” Clary’s voice is clear and honest. “You always seemed like – I don’t know, like you knew that about each other.”

“And I think you know about Kaelie, from Taki’s?” Jace continues like she hadn’t spoken. “She’s an exhibitionist. She always wanted us to get caught.” Clary swirls light touch over his thigh, not sexual, just there, just constant.

Clary.

Clary.

Clary.

“The – I don’t even know what she is,” Jace laughs hollowly. “The proprietess of The Pandemonium Club – Magnus knows her, they’re friends or something, I don’t know, from a million years ago. She likes me and I don’t know why. She said I remind her of someone she used to know. She – I used to do her in the back rooms. I probably was doing that when you were there with Simon, sometimes. Before we met.”

Clary’s hand reaches his arm and she follows the line of his bluest veins up over his wrist, seeing where the line is interrupted by runes and scars. “Do you – I mean, did you – did you like her?”

“I never loved her. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

“I know. I didn’t ask if you loved her. I asked if you liked her, if – if you were nice to each other and if you respected her.”

Jace nods. Curt. Once. “Yeah. I liked her.”

Clary smiles at him like his heart’s not breaking inside his chest. “That’s good.”

“But then I fucked some Downworlder I’ve never spoken to,” Jace says harshly, his golden eyes fierce. “When I found out you were my sister. I went to Palmistria and fucked her against the wall because she had red hair.”

Clary looked at her knees, but didn’t stop running her fingers in slow lines over his arm. “That’s when I almost – that’s when I, with Simon.” Then she looks up. “And you slept with Aline, in Idris.”

Jace swallows. “I thought you – how did you know?”

Clary smiles wryly. “I’m a virgin, not stupid. I know every expression on your face, Jace Lightwood, and that was definitely an ‘after’ and not a ‘before’ face.”

“I’m sorry.” Jace sighs and finally touches her again, just a line with his pinkie finger over her nose. “I was – there’s no excuse, there’s no reason to use someone like that. But you know I was – ”

“It was really bad for all of us then,” Clary says, understanding and not judging and _oh, Angel_ she still loves him. She kisses his shoulder through the stiff sleeve of his gear and Jace slides his long pianist’s fingers through her soft red hair.

“So, how ‘almost’ with Simon?” he asks, not to be deterred from his point now that she knows, she knows everything about him, more than anyone ever has, and _she’s still here_.

Clary’s eyes are wet and bright and so deep Jace thinks he might drown. “Guess.”

Their kiss is slow and delicate and continues and continues, and Jace holds his weight over her on the mattress and Clary wants him to bury her, crush her, the way he did once in a field outside the ruins of an angel and Wayland manor, but Jace – Jace wants to savor this.

He’s never hovered over a girl like this, so he could see her face and watch every feeling flash through her eyes. This is what he’s been waiting for, waiting for _Clary_

Clary.

He can’t take his golden, luminous eyes from her face as she watches him kiss her hip. He drags the black cotton of her t-shirt – gear discarded already; it was too hard to _feel_ in armor – up over her torso, her pale skin dotted with freckles everywhere the same way his is crossed over with the silver-pink remnants of old _iratzes_. He mouths at the swelling underside of one breast through the lace of a simple bra. 

“This ‘almost?’“ he murmurs against her skin.

Her fingers card through his hair. “A little more almost-y.”

Jace’s brow furrows and he kisses the shadow between Clary’s bra cups before helping her take off the t-shirt entirely, and he rumbles low in his chest like the lion Clary always thought he resembled as her warm hands drag up his skin, counting ribs and muscles, following his shirt as that comes off, too.

He wraps his arms around her and pulls her in close, letting her hips rest on his and really feel what she does – what she’s always done – to him. “This ‘almost?’”

Clary reaches behind her and unhooks her bra; lets it fall down her pale arms. “You’re getting closer.”

Jace scowls. “Do I need to kill Simon next time I see him?”

Clary rolls her eyes. “No.” Her mouth quirks. “He has the Mark of Cain, it’d be suicide. And I kinda like you.”

“Should I be regretting keeping him alive?”

Clary’s cheeks color again. “Maybe. You can decide when you get there.”

Jace’s scowl reaches epic proportions. “And where exactly is ‘there?’”

Clary catches her lip between her teeth and unzips her black jeans, sliding them down from her hips. Jace watches them, holding his breath, staring at the tiny blue cornflowers dotting her underwear, simple and discrete and feminine and colorful and _Clary_. Clary, Clary, Clary – 

She lifts his hand and presses it against that blue-flowered underwear. Even through the cotton she’s soft and hot and wet and _perfect_ and – 

“This ‘almost.’” Clary says softly. “He wanted – but… I just… I couldn’t. I loved you too much. Even then.”

Jace’s gold eyes look through Clary in a way that he’s never looked at anyone before. Not Isabelle, when they took each other’s virginity in the middle of the night; not Kaelie, when she grabbed him by the beltloops and pulled him into the icy kitchen; not Tessa, when she coiled herself around his hips and kissed and bit at his star-shaped mark; not the faceless red-haired girl who would never, never be Clary; not Aline, who wanted so desperately to want him.

This is for Clary. This is for Clary because this is for _him_.

 

 

   
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